Consciousness As Presence : Wolfgang Fasching

Philosophy of Mind
23

It’s messier than that.

Shortly after Schlick arrived in Vienna in 1922, he was invited by the mathematicians Hans Hahn and Kurt Reidemeister to participate in a seminar on Principia Mathematica by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. At the same time he became acquainted with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung / Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921/1922). In 1924 Schlick organized (at the request of his students Herbert Feigl and Friedrich Waismann) an extra-curricular discussion group, which came to be called the ‘Schlick Circle’ and after 1929 the ‘Vienna Circle’. Their first reading was Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Stadler 2001 [2015], Chs. 3, 4, 6). Soon Schlick was writing to Wittgenstein (Dec.12, 1924), seeking additional copies of his work, telling him about the study group in Vienna, and requesting personal meetings. This was not successful because Wittgenstein had left philosophy behind and worked as a school teacher in Lower Austria before he returned to Vienna in 1926 working as an architect for a house of his sister Margaret. But after several failed attempts, Schlick finally arranged with Wittgenstein’s sister, Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein to visit him in early 1927 (McGuinness 1967, 14). The first clear evidence that Schlick had obtained a copy of the Tractatus, which he had been reading and studying since 1922, was in a letters of Ludwig Hänsel, January 10 and 25, 1925 (Hänsel-Wittgenstein 1994, 92), later being confirmed to Einstein in June of 1927 (Schlick 1927a). The following month Schlick effusively described the Tractatus as “the deepest” work of the new philosophy (Schlick 1927b). Over the next few years Schlick and Wittgenstein, mostly together with Waismann till 1934, met as time permitted up to 1936, carrying on philosophical discussions ranging over a broad array of topics, from the idea of geometry as syntax, to verificationist and operationalist theories of meaning, topics in logic and mathematics, and even solipsism.

To give you a sense of Schlick:

In correspondence with Einstein Schlick explained that his monograph Raum und Zeit in der gegenwärtigen Physik was “less a representation of the general theory itself than a thorough-going elucidation of the thesis that space and time have now forfeited all objectivity in physics” … Schlick is referring to Einstein’s remark, in his 1916 paper on the General Theory, that the admission of arbitrary coordinative transformations “removes the last vestige of physical objectivity from space and time.”

Also:

The intuitive images of experience are spatially ordered, since they exhibit relative locations as well as spatial extension. In addition, since experiences occur one after another, they also exhibit an intuitive temporal order. This results in a distinct spatio-temporal ordering for each of the sense modalities, so that an intuitive order of smells, as well as an intuitive order of tastes (and so forth), is given in experience. The first step in the advance from purely subjective experiences to the transcendent ordering of scientific objects (according to his critical realism) is to coordinate the spatio-temporal frameworks of the distinct sense modalities. Thus, when a sore spot on one’s leg is touched by one’s forefinger, the feeling of the touch is accompanied by a visual image of the finger touching the leg. The coincidence of these two separate and distinct types of sensory data contributes evidence to the overall coordination of the spatio-temporal orders of the different sense modalities. This is the method of point-coincidences which Schlick used to characterize the advance from the purely subjective domain of qualitative images to knowledge of the transcendent world. Of course, the idea of point-coincidences also plays a central role in General Relativity, and it has generally been assumed that Schlick picked up the idea from his work on the new physics. But recent scholarship has demonstrated that, in fact, Schlick worked on the notion long before Einstein published the General Theory, and may well have been Einstein’s source for the notion (Engler 2009, 135ff). The important point in the present context is that the coordination of a single individual’s sense modalities is but the first step in the construction of the transcendent order. The next phase consists of the coordination of point-coincidences among different individuals. If an instructor wishes to draw attention to some feature of a triangle on a blackboard at the front of a class, he points to the feature, thus effecting a point-coincidence between the tip of his finger and the feature of the triangle. And even though everyone witnessing the demonstration has a different perspective, what they all share is their observation of the point-coincidence of fingertip and the geometric feature. Further, it is to be noted that not every sensory point-coincidence is an objective one, and not every objective point-coincidence is observed directly; it may be constructed or inferred from ones that are. Ultimately, all measurements, all determinations of space and time, are based on just such spatio-temporal point-coincidences.

24

I like that we return to the issues themselves.

What is present here, as I read it, is not “consciousness-as-presence” but the instituted, normative subject as articulator of belief. This instituted subject is part of the “forum,” and the “I” involved depends on the co-institution of a “you.”

In my view, the use of “ground” is misleading, as this makes consciousness one more ( very special) thing in the world. To me it’s only a remembering of the ontological difference that preserves us from a confusing reification of “phenomenal” consciousness, which is the “(unfinished, dynamic) there-ness” of the world. This presence “includes absence,” and that’s why a “deeper” but more obscure term for it is “time.” Dasein is not in time but time itself, that kind of thing.

25

I can agree with this, almost, if appropriated as follows:

“You cannot show the Atman” can be read toward an insistence on the ontological difference. The being of beings is not a being among beings. Consciousness as “presence” is not itself present, though of course the sign “consciousness” is present. So the difficultly is using a sign, a noun even, to point at the world’s “just being here.”

The “Experiencer [ fixed typo ] is the Atman” is misleading, for the empirical experience, the flesh and blood human, is something shown, something there. I may need a mirror to see my face, but I don’t need a mirror to see my hands, and I can talk about myself in causal and normative terms, so that I am very much a thing of this world.

On the other hand, the phenomenal consciousness associated with me as an empirical subject is the presence/being/quality of what is there. And what is there has an implicit “from-a-point-of-view-ness.” As Husserl saw, the spatial object as such “shows itself in adumbrations.” These adumbrations are only adumbrations of an also-for-others enduring object through a logical-temporal synthesis that we enact. But this ‘we’ is empirical and qualitative.

26

It actually reads 'the experiencer’ i.e. ‘the subject of experience’. That emphasis on the indispensability of the observer is what phenomenology has in common with non-dualism. I think the intuition underlying both is the realisation that the mind-and-world are not actually separable, that reality is not something we ourselves are outside of or apart from. Whereas objectivity is applicable precisely with regards to those things we can treat as objects.

Wasn’t Maurice Schlick the Vienna Circle member that was horribly murdered on the steps of his University? I seem to remember that this was a real blow to the Vienna Circle.

I took the important part of that article on Wittgenstein to be the following:

The key paragraph 6.522 in the Tractatus:

“There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”

In other words, there is a categorically different kind of truth from that which we can state in empirically or logically verifiable propositions. These different truths fall on the other side of the demarcation line of the principle of verification.

Wittgenstein’s intention in asserting this is precisely to protect matters of value from being disparaged or debunked by scientifically-minded people such as the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle. He put his view beyond doubt in this sequence of paragraphs:

“6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is value which is of value, it must lie outside of all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world.”

In other words, all worldly actions and events are contingent (‘accidental’), but matters of value are necessarily so, for they are ‘higher’ or too important to be accidental, and so must be outside the world of empirical propositions:

"6.42 Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher.

6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental."

That article concludes:

The declared aim of the Vienna Circle was to make philosophy either subservient to or somehow akin to the natural sciences. As Ray Monk says in his superb biography Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990), “the anti-metaphysical stance that united them [was] the basis for a kind of manifesto which was published under the title The Scientific View of the World: The Vienna Circle.” Yet as Wittgenstein himself protested again and again in the Tractatus, the propositions of natural science “have nothing to do with philosophy” (6.53); “Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences” (4.111); “It is not problems of natural science which have to be solved” (6.4312); “even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all” (6.52); “There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical” (6.522). None of these sayings could possibly be interpreted as the views of a man who had renounced metaphysics. The Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle had got Wittgenstein wrong, and in so doing had discredited themselves.

27

I offer another complex passage from Fasching, from a different paper, which I unpack below:

So when we say that being is most originally experienced in the form of am-ness, this does not mean that I experience the existence of a presupposed entity that happens to be me— rather, the immediate disclosedness of being is am-ness. This being is not self-evident because it is my being, but, vice versa, this self-evidence constitutes “mineness”, the “inwardness” of subjectivity. “Being as am-ness” (in contrast to is-ness) means nothing other than this revealedness of being “from within”, i.e. from the absolute non-distance, without any subject-- object separation: There is not being “over there” and the I “here”, “looking” at the former, there simply occurs the immediate self-revealedness of being, and this is what I innermostly am. The I is this self-revealedness of being and therefore—given the aforementioned non- distance, i.e. the non-distinctness of what is revealed and the to-whom of revelation—it is being itself in its self-revealedness. The inwardness of subjectivity is nothing other than the inwardness of being itself: Being-as-experienced-from-within. Yet, one might counter, is it not nonetheless quite obviously the case—even if one con- cedes that there is no I prior to its self-givenness—that it is only one’s own respective being that is immediately revealed to oneself, and in no way being-as-such, being as a whole? Let us consider more closely what we mean by that. What exactly is meant by “only my own being”? My experiential life consists in a flux of phenomenal contents being immediately given to me, and these form, in a way, “my” experiential field, the sphere of my subjective interiority. These are without any question particular occurrences which happen within the existence-realm and not the existence-dimension itself. However, I am not these contents. I am the one to whom these contents are experientially present, the experiencer of these contents (the “witness”, sākṣin, as the Advaitins put it). Now for Advaita Vedānta, this experiencer is nothing but the experiencing itself—consciousness—and not some entity that is conscious. Normally, we tend to think that appearing needs some entity (an “I”) for which this appearing takes place (to which the respective contents are present). Yet Advaita (I think, not implausibly; cf. Fasching 2021) denies this. There simply happens appearing, and the “I” (or the “self”, as Advaita prefers to call it) is nothing but this taking-place of appearing. That is, consciousness is not conceived as a property or activity of some additionally existing I-entity that would therefore be the experiencer. The “witness” consists in nothing but the taking-place of “witnessing”.

So what Advaita understands by consciousness is obviously not what one might call the “conscious mind” in the sense of the manifold conscious acts and states (the vṛttis), i.e. the experiences (they are contents we are conscious of), but consciousness itself in the strict sense, i.e. our being aware of any and all such contents. This is not itself one of the contents that are present to us, or some constellation of contents, or the sum of the contents (what I called the “experiential field” above), but the experiencing of these contents, i.e. that which makes them experientially present: Presence itself.

And this consciousness is not something that is somehow added to the experiences. The latter have their very existence in being experienced: Being experientially present is the mode of actuality of experiences. One could say that experiences have a subjective ontology, they have their being in their for-ness.

Yet “for-ness” is actually already too much, for, as we have seen, to Advaita there is no additional entity for which presence takes place (to which the respective contents are given). There is simply the taking-place of presence, which is nothing other than the mere thereness of the respectively present contents. The “I” is ultimately not an additional entity for which this presence happens, but simply this presence itself and thus: The mere actuality of the phenomenal.

Fasching is wrestling with two notions of the ‘I’ or ‘the subject.’ I am suggesting that phenomenal consciousness is not a subject at all, not a thing in the first place. But as flesh-and-blood subjects in the world, who report “experiences” to one another, it’s very tempting to describe consciousness as a special entity or stuff. My thread on meaning tries to clear away this distraction, by explicating the “meaning” of signs in terms of the performance of the “same-enough-ness” of empirical events. It is a qualitative performance.

The “for-ness” is “there” in the “experienced world,” as a component of its “quality.” The heads sign of a penny is manifest rather then the tails. Perspective is “there in the way the object shows itself.”

28

Ah, typo on my part ! But I’m against the reification of (phenomenal) consciousness as a subject. The subject is “there” in how what is present is present, and of course present also as hands or a face in the mirror.

29

Yes. And this is also in empiricism and positivism and phenomenalism. But for me the issue is how do we specify this relationship of “mind” and “world” ? To me the understanding of consciousness as “being” is a “strong overcoming” of dualist alienation, but its genial and radical pluralism is going to sound like idealism to most. But only if consciousness is still reified as a containing or hosting stuff, and experience is presupposed as something “internal.”

30

Way too general and polemical, and I could oppose individual claims. For instance, Schlick saw philosophy as the clarification of meaning. He didn’t think he was doing physics. He and others were digging into the meaning of the basic terms of physics and other sciences. This is “like” metaphysics because it’s looking into the relatively fixed framework of description, the “form” of the world. But it’s unlike metaphysics ( as they tended to see it ) because it isn’t an alternative science of mysterious entities. From their POV, they were doing a generalized theory of science, not an uncanny science of non-empirical entities. Yet explication turns out to “feel” like ( to “be” ?) an uncanny super-science at times, because language is not “painted on” a world already formed. If I learn to “hear the same words differently,” then I already live in a different world.

31

Yes. Karl Sigmund wrote a great book that includes this story. Exact Thinking In Demented Times.

32

This is a deep issue. What I recall is that Wittgenstein was disgusted by the “rationalization” of ethics.

But I’m definitely with you and Wittgenstein on the rejection of narrow conceptions of “verification.” Just also saying some of the logical positivists do not fit the “cartoon synopsis.” There’s a reason Wittgenstein was writing a book with Weissmann and enjoyed the company of Schlick.

33

But it’s not, though. The classic empiricists take sensory (or sensible) experience as sine qua non. Mind is tabula rasa, blank slate, on which impressions are left by experience, which is the source of all knowledge. There is nothing like the reflection on ‘witness-consciousness’ per from Fasching. It’s chalk and cheese. (There’s a very active Advaita teacher on youtube nowadays, Swami Sarvapriyananda, who is the head of the Vedanta Society of New York, which was founded by Vivekananda after the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in (I think) 1889 or thereabouts.)

As for the distinction between phenomenology and phenomenalism: they are different schools of thought. Phenomenalism was associated with the empiricists, such as John Stuart Mill’s ‘objects as the permanent possibilites of sensation’. It was the principle that the mind and its sensory content were the only basis of certain knowledge. Again ‘all knowledge from experience’, by which they mean sensory experience, things that can be checked, weighed and measured (or otherwise validated logically). It’s utterly different from phenomenology, which started with Brentano and the intentionality of conscious acts elaborated by Husserl.

‘Husserl’s real target (in the Crisis of the European Sciences) is the then-current positivist and neo-positivist interpretations of modern science (Crisis § 3), associated with Comte, Mach and the Vienna Circle (Husserl was familiar with Schlick and Carnap). The nineteenth century had been the great age of positivism, the doctrine that rejected all forms of speculation and restricted knowledge to be the contents of sensory experience. Auguste Comte (1798-1857), for instance, championed modern science against religious-mythic and metaphysical thought9 . For the positivists, science was objective, inductive, and experimental. Husserl regarded the positivists as holding an essentially mistaken conception of science due to their deliberate narrowing of the concept of reason: they denied the essential contribution of subjectivity and as a consequence had ‘decapitated’ philosophy (C 9; K 7)’ Dermot Moran.

It’s against my principles to be nice about positivism. :wink:

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I’d like to explain my use of “quality.” People talk of the “physical” world in an ambigous way. Scientistic philosophers ( as I am sort of defining them ) leap into a Pythagorean math-mysticism and yet pretend to care about the empiricism in empirical science, while they “scrub the quality” from objects. They don’t see the incoherence, strangely because their ideas lack pragmatic import and miss entirely the persuasive force of science as qualitatively effective technology altogether. I am not asking them to worship this power. Just to notice it, that people are convinced through “personal sensory experience.” “Seeing is believing,” and we trust what reliably stops the pain and/or makes us happy. Not celebrating or accusing here. Just trying to point at the centrality of “quality” ( the “sensory”) even in science. The word “physical” has lost its wings in this regard, because the scientistic mystics have won. That’s my joke. But seriously “the physical” has become as obscure as a horoscope for many thinkers, who presuppose the “physical” to refer beyond experience ----who don’t see experience as the foundation of the concept. Hence the use of “quality.” Feuerbach’s “materialism” was more like a quality-ism or a prioritization of “sensation and feeling.”

But positivism/empiricism/phenomenalism doesn’t ignore “quality.” They refer to “sensation” as a pointer to what is “immediate.” So they are trucking with something adjacent to “the mystical,” even if they prioritize explaining empirical science as empirical science. Merleau-Ponty writes of the primacy of perception. Perception is “mine” or has a “for-me-ness.” The apple has color, shape, taste, the tactile-aural crunch of a bite into it. Or it does for me, and I believe it does for other. The presence of this “quality” is “consciousness” in the most radical and also most simple if nevertheless or therefore elusive sense. This is my claim. So “mind stuff” is “only” performed patterns in presencing quality. The “for-me-ness” is “implicit” except in the verbalizations of the constituted subject, no less real for being socially constituted, anymore than numbers are less real for being performed in the qualitative world. Not “the physical world,” as if “physical” is the “non-mental.” For such dualism is no longer tempting if consciousness is not longer a “stuff” and “meaning” is no longer presupposed as “non-qualitative.” As I read Plato’s unwritten doctrine, there is no “meaning” that does not “live as quality.” Signs ( words, inscriptions, salutes, smiles) are events in the world, that are signs because of the way we live with them. I mean that signs, and all objects in the world, have (for instance) color, sound, or beauty, or pain. In other words, presence. Which, as others will remind us, absence. Or they wouldn’t be objects. We can “afford” a genial, evolving pluralism. No categories need be fixed and rigid. Promises no less real than protons, etc.

Fasching seems to get at it here:

This being is not self-evident because it is my being, but, vice versa, this self-evidence constitutes “mineness”, the “inwardness” of subjectivity.

What he doesn’t go into is the “temporal structure” of what is therefore a “stream” of (an enduring someone’s) “experience.”

35

In my OP, the thesis I take from Fasching could be expressed as something like consciouness is the “presence” of “sensory objects.” For me the point is that “there is no witness.” Of course there is a “for-me-ness” that needs to be explicated.

Why would sensation be so important to empiricists ? Because it is the paradigm case of for-me-ness. I can’t see the world through your eyes, nor you through mine. Seeing is believing. The primacy of the perceptual.

I might even agree that “quality” is the sine qua non. What is presence, after all ? What is it for something to be there ? To be now ? This or that being’s presence is its “quality.” The red apple before me. Implicitly before, because one side and not the other appears. And then explicitly as signs allow us the self-consciousness that comes with enacted sociality — enacted in the world, not in metaphysical mind-bubbles. All objects, even toothaches, are “transcendent” or “between us.” But “transcendent” should be read as “beyond-me.” So objects are for-me and beyond-me, at least when I’ve become the epistemological subject.
I’m saying that “the witness” has a certain reality but is “not as deep” as “consciouness itself.” Of course this is very difficult to discuss ! But I like that we are trying.

36

I find it odd you post this, given what I’ve already quoted. Husserl enlarged the concept of intuition from something like sensation to something that also included essences, thereby becoming a “genuine” positivist. His gripe, as he indicates in Ideas, is that those pesky positivists were prejudiced after all. They weren’t positivistic enough.

As genuine standpoint-philosophers, and in obvious contradistintion to their principle of freedom from prejudice, the empiricists start from unclarified preconceived opinions whose truth has not been grounded. On the other hand, we take our start from what lies prior to all standpoints: from the total realm of whatever is itself given intuitionally and prior to all theorizing, from everything that one can immediately see and seize upon — if only one does not let himself be blinded by prejudices and prevented from taking into consideration whole classes of genuine data. If “positivism” is tantamount to an absolutely unprejudiced grounding of all sciences on the “positive,” that is to say, on what can be seized upon originaliter, then we are the genuine positivists. In fact, we allow no authority to curtail our right to accept all kinds of intuition as equally valuable legitimating sources of cognition — not even the authority of “modern natural science.”

Note that ‘originaliter’ means “from the beginning” or basically “the given.”

Blindness to ideas is a kind of psychical blindness; because of prejudices one becomes incapable of bringing what one has in one’s field of intuition into one’s field of judgment. The truth is that all human beings see “ideas,” “essences,” and see them, so to speak, continuously; they operate with them in their thinking, they also make eidetic judgments — except that from their epistemological standpoint they interpret them away. Evident data are patient; they let the theories pass them by, but remain what they are. It is the business of theories to conform to the data, and the business of theories of knowledge to distinguish fundamental kinds of data and describe such kinds with respect to their proper essences.

Enough now of absurd theories. No conceivable theory can make us err with respect to the principle of all principles: that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily (so to speak, in its “personal” actuality) offered to us in “intuition” is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there. We see indeed that each (theory) can only again draw its truth itself from orgininary data. Every statement which does no more than confer expression on such data by simple explication and by means of significations precisely conforming to them is, as we said at the beginning of this chapter, actually an absolute beginning called upon to serve as a foundation, a principal in the genuine sense of the word.

37

I’ve already quoted Husserl’s gripe about positivism being too close-minded in its refusal to grant “essences” as “given.” I agree with him on that issue, just to be clear. But I still think you are missing what phenomenology and positivism have in common, which is an emphasis on the given and a disdain for speculation.

Ayer traces his positivism back to Hume and Mill, and perhaps you’ll agree that empiricism is close to positivism. But how does this connect to Husserl ? From the Crisis:

LET US STOP FOR A MOMENT. Why does Hume’s Treatise (in comparison to which the Essay Concerning Human Understanding is badly watered down) represent such a great historical event? What happened there? The Cartesian radicalism of presuppositionlessness, with the goal of tracing genuine scientific knowledge back to the ultimate sources of validity and of grounding it absolutely upon them, required reflections directed toward the subject, required the regression to the knowing ego in his immanence. … But was it possible to improve upon Descartes’s procedure? … And now empiricist scepticism brings to light what was already present in the Cartesian fundamental investigation but was not worked out, namely, that all knowledge of the world, the prescientific as well as the scientific, is an enormous enigma.

It was easy to follow Descartes, when he went back to the apodictic ego, in interpreting the latter as soul, in taking the primal self-evidence to be the self-evidence of “inner perception.” … But now, could the “idealism” of Berkeley and Hume, and finally scepticism with all its absurdity, be avoided? What a paradox!

Nothing could cripple the peculiar force of the rapidly growing and, in their own accomplishments, unassailable exact sciences or the belief in their truth. And yet, as soon as one took into account that they are the accomplishments of the consciousness of knowing subjects, their self-evidence and clarity were transformed into incomprehensible absurdity.

No offence was taken if, in Descartes, immanent sensibility engendered pictures of the world; but in Berkeley this sensibility engendered the world of bodies itself; and in Hume the entire soul, with its “impressions” and “ideas,” the forces belonging to it, conceived of by analogy to physical forces, its laws of association (as parallels to the law of gravity!), engendered the whole world, the world itself, not merely something like a picture - though, to be sure, this product was merely a fiction, a representation put together inwardly which was actually quite vague. And this is true of the world of the rational sciences as well as that of experientia vaga.

Was there not, here, in spite of the absurdity which may have been due to particular aspects of the presuppositions, a hidden and unavoidable truth to be felt? Was this not the revelation of a completely new way of assessing the objectivity of the world and its whole ontic meaning and, correlatively, that of the objective sciences, a way which did not attack their own validity but did attack their philosophical or metaphysical claim, that of absolute truth? Now at last it was possible and necessary to become aware of the fact - which had remained completely unconsidered in these sciences - that the life of consciousness is a life of accomplishment: the accomplishment, right or wrong, of ontic meaning, even sensibly intuited meaning, and all the more of scientific meaning.

A “great historical event.” Why ? Because of the turn toward evidence in terms of a not-yet-generalized intuition. I think you use the word “positivist” as a synonym for naive scientism, when thinkers like Mach and Ayer are uncomfortably close to Husserl.
But Husserl was far more ambitious philosophically, and wanted to explain how we share the lifeworld, which is “real” and yet “subjective.” This requires making sense of “meaning.”

Of course tone and “feel for the world” of positivists like Mach and Ayer is also different. There’s a obvious “spirituality” in Mach’s The Analysis of Sensations, but it’s very dry and playful. The self too is just a pattern in the “elements.”

38

Well now I don’t think such bias is necessarily to be celebrated. But I think we all have bias or stand-point.

39

One of those differences is over the notion of lived experience, which Heidegger submits to a devastating critique. Commenting on the writing of Being and Time, he says:

The gazing upon ourselves is carried out from a leap ahead into Da-sein. For the sake of the first meditation, however, there had to be an attempt to set in relief at all, utterly with respect to extreme modes of being of the human being, the difference in kind between Dasein and all “lived experience” and "consciousness“. (Contributions)

40

You point out that the positivism of figures like Mach and Ayer stops short of a thoroughgoing and radical reduction to the primordial evidences of transcendental phenomenology. This is certainly true, but the devil is in the details. Is the most apodictically grounded basis of empiricism to be located as a presenting of world to subject or in a constituting synthesis of world within subjectivity? How does a radical positivism avoid slipping into the naïveté of the natural empirical attitude if it sees the noetic pole of the intentional act as merely an empty opening onto the ‘real’ world? How does noesis accomplish the production of the real perceptual object?

41

Replying to your first post: it reminded me of the argument that Thomas Nagel made in his seminal 1974 paper What Is It Like to be a Bat? ‘Consciousness’ is a notoriously tricky word, so it’s nice to see the commonality here.

I’ve long thought of consciousness as “the starting point” – encompassing “the all,” but this is an “all” that presents as a subjective perspective. This gets me into all sorts of cross-purpose debates with people that seem to be using the word very differently.

The thing is, when a “step back” is taken (and I’m deliberately avoiding the implication of ‘something’ that is ‘taking’ that step), then consciousness (on this stipulated definition) and ‘being’ seem to merge. I’m uncomfortable calling it a ‘manifestation’ or a ‘phenomenon’ because these terms seem to imply an appearance, and appearances are for whatever it is that they are appearing to. And there isn’t anything.

Is this what you’re getting at? Or have I missed your point?

42

I’m struggling to understand the likenesses between Husserl and positivism that you think you’re pointing out, the long passage you’ve quoted notwithstanding. And there is a textbook distinction between phenomenalism and phenomenology.

'Founded in the early 20th century by Edmund Husserl, phenomenology is primarily a method of studying human experience from the inside. [1, 2]

  • Core Focus: How the mind apprehends, experiences, and gives meaning to the world (a concept known as intentionality).

  • The Method: It involves “bracketing” (suspending) our everyday assumptions about the physical world to uncover the foundational structures of consciousness.

  • Key Thinkers: Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Grounded in empiricism, phenomenalism is an epistemological and metaphysical theory about reality. It argues that objects only exist as a collection of actual or potential sensory experiences (e.g., sights, sounds, textures) rather than as independent physical things. [1, 2]

  • Core Focus: The relationship between perception and the nature of existence.

  • The Claim: A physical object (like a table) is essentially an accumulation of our sensory experiences of it. If nobody is looking at or interacting with the table, it simply becomes a set of “possible” experiences.

  • Key Thinkers: George Berkeley (historically), Ernst Mach, A.J. Ayer (in the 20th century)’ ~ Google search result

As for Husserl’s attitude to the deletirious effects of positivism, it is given in Part II, Section 9, page 23-59 with typical prolixity. The headline summaries of each section are:

A. The rise of the modern scientific conception of nature culminates in the work of Galileo Galilei.
B. Galileo introduces the decisive idea that nature is fundamentally mathematizable.
C. The true structure of nature is conceived as a system of ideal mathematical forms underlying sensory appearances.
D. Sensory qualities are treated as secondary appearances, while mathematical properties are taken as objectively real.
E. Scientific method therefore constructs an idealised mathematical model of nature.
F. This model achieves extraordinary explanatory and predictive success.
G. The mathematical world gradually replaces the world of lived experience as the primary conception of reality.
H. The original abstraction involved in mathematization is forgotten.
I. The theoretical construction is mistaken for the world itself.
J. The lifeworld (Lebenswelt)—the world of everyday experience—becomes concealed.
K. Scientific objectivism thus excludes the experiencing subject who performs science.
L. The resulting philosophical crisis is a loss of insight into the foundations of meaning underlying scientific knowledge.

I see the ‘big picture’ behind phenomenology as overcoming the sense of the separateness of the observer from the observed and from ‘objectivism’ as an overall tendency of thought in which the human being no longer has a place except for as ‘epiphenomenal’.

There’s a book I’ve been reading, The Blind Spot: Why Science cannot ignore Human Experience, by Adam Frank, Marcello Glieser and Evan Thompson, which goes into this critique in great depth and detail. Recommended.

And there’s also the Wolfgang Fasching paper, which can be found in full here. He engages closely with physicalist philosophy of mind, arguing that it picks the wrong targets, i.e. contents of consciousness and not consciousness itself. I will spend a bit of time with it.